The Totes Amazesh Way Millennials Are Changing the English Language

I was talking design with a friend yesterday, and she said something interesting: "The reason all these companies have cute logos is to remind you that they're easy to use. Rounded corners and scratchy infographics conveys that this is simple software, even if it's doing a lot behind the scenes."

As the article points out, 140 characters is not what's driving this. If you're using standard English everywhere, your Facebook posts sound like your cover letters, and that's weird. For a generation who's been dubbed "amiable" as one of the highest virtues, this isn't OK. Figuring out ways to invent slang so it cleanly translates to written text is pretty hard. This is a pretty clever solution to that: anybody who's a native speaker can do it, if you read it out loud, it serializes / deserializes pretty well, and it's novel.

FWIW, I'm 30, and I do know people who talk / tweet like this. It's mostly done sarcastically, though when you do it all the time, is it really sarcastic?

Dude, that's so hip. All those people grooving to the new vibe.

I think it's worth noting that different socioeconomic classes have developed their own vernacular, and thus, it's slightly foggy of the Post to not comment on the population surveyed.

For the more academically minded among us who have time in their day to watch, here's the academic talk given on this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3cJoiGQ7yj0 - I don't have time to watch it now, but totes will later.

I'm a 40 y/o proud GenX'er (best generation ever!) who has a 21 y/o daughter AND just went back to university to finish my degree–so I'm knee-deep in Millennials.

In my experience, Millennials don't talk like this in-person. I do see a little bit of it in SnapChat, YikYak and Instagram. In fact, my wife says "totes" more than any 20-something I've witnessed. Other "words" I've seen used a lot during app communication are "bruh", "fam", and "af".

But when I observe 2 Millennials talking in person, the only way they butcher the English language is by using the word "LIKE" 4 times per sentence. Makes me cringe every time!

> There’s a way that young people talk these days, and it’s totes hilars. You see it on Twitter a lot.

Makes a lot of sense. Speaking to other humans in real life maps perfectly to ideation, generating that into text, and then uploading it to a website that has a 160char limit. Speaking requires a lot of effort because not only do you think of what you want to say, but then you have to verbalize it.

Online, people obviously have to do the first part, but it is so much easier to then find all of the keys associated with an individual word and input them on the per sentence basis, plus you get to include proper punctuation and additional characters which makes this way easier.

This article is super interesting. Language hasn't evolved or changed (even slightly) in the preceding hundred years. It's really weird to think we have been using the same language that came out of Egypt in 2690 b.c. In fact, we still use the same hieroglyphs that adorned the walls of the great pyramid of Giza.

It is pretty amazing if you think about it. From cave paintings, to papyrus scrolls and eventually to Gutenberg's PP, shit even with the digital communications and texting in the 80's and 90's, language has stayed the same.

If this language was good enough for Shakespeare, millenials, the people who often pick up the physical Washington Times everyday, should think twice before foraging on with these nonsensical changes.

Also, the world is more closed now than ever, so ideas often spread slower. Which makes this even more astounding!

As a millennial, I'm pretty sure this isn't my generation but the next one down. Don't know if they have a name yet.

I suppose I'm a millennial, but I'm really struggling to find a single person that actually talks like this.

This type of rhetoric about how "the kids" talks comes up every 20 years. Remember "radical"?

It'd be surprising if the Internet revolution didn't drastically alter languages. The printing press did the same, standardizing them and eliminating many font eccentricities that did not translate well into movable type.

What I see in these is (1) shortening of things to make them easier to type on phones, and (2) the use of a lot of whimsical spellings to convey emotion. People are communicating so much right now via just text that they're going to strain to emote through the medium.

The main reason I posted this is to consider the NLP implication of it.

I think this particular pattern is a fad. It's interesting linguistically because the rules are relatively simple, and it's easy enough to analyze it in the context of changing social dynamics, but most people writing like this are doing so to declare membership in some particular social group and as it becomes more popular it will no longer be a status symbol and fall out of favor. The linguisitic construction might survive to serve a different purpose later though. Even now I see people mimicking it to convey a certain type of sarcasm (and I suspect almost everyone who uses it is at least somewhat sarcastic about it).

But the point that trjordan brings up in their top-level comment, "Figuring out ways to invent slang so it cleanly translates to written text is pretty hard," gets closer to the core observation, which is that the new phenomenon of informal written communication transmitted in small chunks (IM and tweets, mostly) will have, and already has had, a profound impact on language.

Another observation: I spoken communication I try to avoid phrases like "to be honest," "if I recall correctly," etc. because they should be implied: "to be honest" only indicates that previously you may have been lying, and "if I recall correctly" insults your correspondant's ability listen to you critcically — of course "if you recall correctly," everything is "if you recall correctly." But in IM, dropping an extra "tbh" or "iirc" or "idk" into your message changes the inflection of the message, and in a medium so devoid of inflection, that small change can significantly impact meaning. Such phrases are the part of the "body language" of textual communication.

And I notice these communication spilling over into spoken communication. When I speak with somebody now, especially if I usually communicate with them over text, "to be honests" abound!

I predict that in 50 years we'll see that instant messaging has transformed human communication more than the telephone or printing press ever did. The shift will be second only to the rise of mass-literacy.

Sweet Meteor of Death, I welcome your fiery embrace.

Some of these patterns are useful, especially to the careful listener. For example, the tech world has many helpful people who flag sentences that can be safely ignored by the listener by starting them with "So, ... ".

This is something I talk about with my friend who is doing a PhD in linguistics. I noticed as well that the internet is changing the English language. The rampant globalization that came with the internet combined with English being the defacto language of the internet has allowed it to change. It would be interested to mine Twitter and a few other sources and try to observe how English is changing.

I suspect if you mined Twitter, you would see a 'dumbing down' of English due to the constraints of Twitter. How one would quantify 'dumbing down' is a challenge (if it hasn't been solved already). However, I am more interested in how this 'Twitter effect' cascades to other areas of English.

There are other implications of the internet too I'd love to study but these questions are relevant to this article.

Men loven of propre kynde newefangelnesse [...] And loven novelries.

-Chaucer (Squire's Tale)

I will happily support all of these changes to the written English language if the millennials would please try to rein in the vocal fry that's made NPR unlistenable.

I would be curious to see if someone has studied how twitter has changed english language and grammer rules due to its 150 char limit

I'm technically a Millennial (born 1984), but everything about Millennial culture just makes me cringe.

Same with this obsession with "artisanal" stuff, walkable neighborhoods, and the like.

Awesome!

Also groovy.

And formidable.

As usual, the trick while reading these is to replace 'millennial' with 'people younger and more attractive than I am'. Also applies to people who begin sentences with 'I am technically a millennial but..'.

Wasn't it plato or Socrates who complained about those damn young people who are good for nothing, complain about everything, and can't even speak proper Greek?

To their credit though, the Greek civilization DID fall soon-ish, so maybe the YOUNGs are _really_ screwy idiots who are NOT on fleek.

EDIT: Apparently I'd misunderstood the meaning of 'on fleek' for a long time.

> it’s following all the rules of English.

Doesn't English require proper spelling of English words?

140 char lims are tuff k?